Facebook approaches SC over Aadhaar linkage pleas

SC to take up matter on Monday

American online social media and networking company, Facebook has approached the Supreme Court for transfer of four different petitions -- for making Aadhaar authentication with individual profile mandatory-- pending in high courts across the country, to the top court.

A bench of Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose would take up Facebook's plea on Monday.

It is learnt that Tamil Nadu would oppose the transfer as the matter pending before the high court had reached the advanced stage. Attorney General K K Venugopal is likely to represent the state, which maintained that it had earlier faced law and order problem several times. A girl had committed suicide after her face was posted on a nude photo and Facebook allegedly delayed giving information on the culprit.

In its plea, Facebook, for its part, contended that two petitions filed in Madras High Court and one each in Bombay and Madhya Pradesh High Court contained the same prayer and seek same relief to "link Aadhaar information to social media accounts which would potentially allow for attribution of content to the person who posted such content".

"Transfer would serve the interest of justice by avoiding the possibility of conflicting decisions from four common cases. Indeed avoiding conflicting decisions is particularly necessary here to ensure that users are afforded equal privacy protection across the country and to prevent an infeasible situation where the petitioner which operates uniform platform throughout India, is ordered to link Aadhaar information only for users in certain Indian states but not others," it said

The questions involved in the matter related to interpretation of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and Aadhaar and Other Laws (Amendment) Ordinance, 2019, it pointed out.